Boys were interested in her, but she seldom went out. When her father would ask her why, she would reply, “They’re all so young, Papa.” She knew that one day she would marry a lawyer like her father.
On Jennifer’s sixteenth birthday, her mother left town with the eighteen-year-old son of their next-door neighbor, and Jennifer’s father quietly died. It took seven years for his heart to stop beating, but he was dead from the moment he heard the news about his wife. The whole town knew and was sympathetic, and that, of course, made it worse, for Abner Parker was a proud man. That was when he began to drink. Jennifer did everything she could to comfort him but it was no use, and nothing was ever the same again.
The next year, when it came time to go to college, Jennifer wanted to stay home with her father, but he would not hear of it.
“We’re going into partnership, Jennie,” he told her. “You hurry up and get that law degree.”
When she was graduated she enrolled at the University of Washington in Seattle to study law. During the first year of school, while Jennifer’s classmates were flailing about in an impenetrable swamp of contracts, torts, property, civil procedure and criminal law, Jennifer felt as though she had come home. She moved into the university dormitory and got a job at the Law Library.
Jennifer loved Seattle. On Sundays, she and an Indian student named Ammini Williams and a big, rawboned Irish girl named Josephine Collins would go rowing on Green Lake in the heart of the city, or attend the Gold Cup races on Lake Washington and watch the brightly colored hydroplanes flashing by.
There were great jazz clubs in Seattle, and Jennifer’s favorite was Peter’s Poop Deck, where they had crates with slabs of wood on top instead of tables.
Afternoons, Jennifer, Ammini and Josephine would meet at The Hasty Tasty, a hangout where they had the best cottagefried potatoes in the world.
There were two boys who pursued Jennifer: a young, attractive medical student named Noah Larkin and a law student named Ben Munro; and from time to time Jennifer would go out on dates with them, but she was far too busy to think about a serious romance.
The seasons were crisp and wet and windy and it seemed to rain all the time. Jennifer wore a green-and-blue-plaid lumber jacket that caught the raindrops in its shaggy wool and made her eyes flash like emeralds. She walked through the rain, lost in her own secret thoughts, never knowing that all those she passed would file away the memory.
In spring the girls blossomed out in their bright cotton dresses. There were six fraternities in a row at the university, and the fraternity brothers would gather on the lawn and watch the girls go by, but there was something about Jennifer that made them feel unexpectedly shy. There was a special quality about her that was difficult for them to define, a feeling that she had already attained something for which they were still searching.
Every summer Jennifer went home to visit her father. He had changed so much. He was never drunk, but neither was he ever sober. He had retreated into an emotional fortress where nothing could touch him again.
He died when Jennifer was in her last term at law school. The town remembered, and there were almost a hundred people at Abner Parker’s funeral, people he had helped and advised and befriended over the years. Jennifer did her grieving in private. She had lost more than a father. She had lost a teacher and a mentor.
After the funeral Jennifer returned to Seattle to finish school. Her father had left her less than a thousand dollars and she had to make a decision about what to do with her life. She knew that she could not return to Kelso to practice law, for there she would always be the little girl whose mother had run off with a teen-ager.
Because of her high scholastic average, Jennifer had interviews with a dozen top law firms around the country, and received several offers.